“If you fight me, even without meaning to, it will hurt more than I want it to,” he said, and he shuddered. Then he pushed firmly against her resistance.
Elizabeth drew a deep breath. She wanted this. She wanted him! And, reassuring herself, she did what Banon had told her would give her man pleasure. She wrapped her slender legs about his hard torso, gasping, “Hurry!”
He needed no further encouragement. Drawing himself back just slightly, he plunged deep into her fair body, feeling her virginity tear and give way before his passionate onslaught. Elizabeth’s cry of sudden pain was like a knife to his heart. He stopped a moment to let her body grow used to this invasion. Then he began a slow and carefully measured rhythm, moving himself back and forth within the tight, hot passage that had welcomed him.
Beneath his sweating male body Elizabeth Meredith was filled with a surprising sense of power. She held him in her arms as he labored over her, almost weeping as her fears subsided and her own desires began to overwhelm her. “Oh, Baen!” she cried. “Oh, my love! My darling!”
He couldn’t get enough of her! And the sweet words of her building passion but roused his lust for her more. “Elizabeth! My angel! My own!” he sobbed, kissing her wet cheeks tenderly.
“Don’t stop!” she innocently begged him.
“I don’t think I can,” he groaned low. “I have never had such a need!”
“You see!” And he heard the triumph in her voice. “I told you we were meant to be mated, Baen MacColl! Oh! Oh!” She was growing dizzy with the pleasure now beginning to race through her body.
The knowledge that his own passions were stoking hers filled him with an incredible sense of power. He had wanted her. Now he needed her. She was necessary to life itself. She shuddered beneath him, and, unable to sustain himself further, he loosed his love juices into her fevered young body, growling into her ear as he did so, “Now, you border witch, are you satisfied?” And to his surprise she answered him.
“Not yet, hinny love! This is but our beginning.”
He fell away from her, laughing, a sound that was part amusement and part relief. “Elizabeth! Elizabeth! What am I to do with you?” he asked her.
“Love me more!” she told him, flinging herself atop him so that their bodies met.
“You are newly breached, sweetheart,” he said. “And I need some sleep.”
“Do you not want to make love to me again?” she asked him.
“I will need some sleep in order to recover my strength,” he explained.
“I have seen the stallion mount several mares in succession out in the fields,” she told him, sounding puzzled.
“As much as I would like to be the stallion, I am but a man,” he told her. “And you should not be found in my bed on the morrow, sweetheart.”
“Aye,” she agreed. “What is between us should remain between us only for now.” She slipped from the bed and donned her chemise, which he had not seen before. Then, going to the door, she turned and smiled a sweet smile at him. “Good night, Baen,” she said, and was gone.
He lay back in his bed, considering the last hour and what he had shared with Elizabeth Meredith. She had boldly seduced him. He almost laughed aloud again. And he had allowed himself to be seduced, even though he knew better. But there was no going back. He could not change what had happened, and the truth was, he didn’t want to change it. He loved the brazen baggage. He loved the lady of Friarsgate. Then his thoughts grew sober. It could not happen again. He owed his father his loyalty, and it was a loyalty he could not share with Elizabeth Meredith.
But Elizabeth would not be deterred. She entrapped him in a barn the following day, and before he knew it he was fucking her lustily in a stall full of sweet-smelling hay. She shamelessly pulled him beneath a hedgerow in a sheep meadow one afternoon, and they coupled despite his laughing protests. She teased him wickedly with little touches and kisses when no one else was looking. She came to his chamber each night, and he could not refuse her. He felt complete now only when he was with her. When he was filling her with his passion. When she lay beneath him crying out with her own need. It was madness, yet neither of them could cease indulging in their desperate hunger for each other. Elizabeth was certain her plan was succeeding. Soon he would be hers forever!
“I will surely get you with child,” he warned her one night as they lay, limbs entwined, in his bed. “I don’t want you shamed by a bastard, as my mother was shamed. I don’t want the child ridiculed by the circumstances of his birth. I will have to leave you soon, sweetheart. We do not speak of it now, but you know it.”
“Handfast with me,” Elizabeth said casually. “That way if you return to your father’s house, any child that comes of our love will be legitimate. A handfast is good for only a year and a day, Baen. If I do not have a child in that time then there is no harm done to anyone. Soon it will be Michaelmas, and many handfast secretly then. If you would leave me, then a handfast between us will protect me.”
“You know I must go,” he told her unhappily. “I have never made a secret of it.”
“You could come back,” Elizabeth said. “I do not believe your father needs you more than I do, Baen. He has two legitimate sons. If you were not so stubborn you would see that. We are equals in so many ways, my darling. Are you telling me that the master of Grayhaven is such a tyrant that he would forbid you marriage to an heiress with good lands? That he doesn’t want you to be happy?”
“I warned you!” he growled at her. She was confusing him.
She pulled his head to hers and kissed him passionately. “Aye,” she agreed. “You warned me, but I did not believe that once we became lovers, you could so casually cast me aside. I am not some cotter’s daughter or tavern wench!” Her hand reached down to fondle him, and he grew instantly hard within her warm, taunting fingers. Then Elizabeth boldly mounted him, feeling his length slip into her love passage, filling it with his bulk and his heat. “Can you so easily desert me, my love?” she demanded of him, riding him, seeing the lust rising in his stormy gray eyes.
His hands reached up to crush her two breasts. “We will handfast, you hot-blooded border bitch, because I love you, and to protect any fruit of our passion. But my first loyalty will always be to he who sired me and acknowledged me as his own.” He rolled her over and began pumping her fiercely.
Elizabeth cried out, half with anger, half with pleasure. “You bastard!” she hissed at him, and he laughed.
“There has never been any doubt of that, sweetheart,” he told her.
The air crackled with their determination and energy as they made passionate love. Their need for each other had but grown over the weeks since Elizabeth had first come to Baen’s bed. They both admitted to being in love, but it made no difference. Their loyalties were divided, and neither would give way to the other.
